Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors is a poignant exploration of family, loss, and the complexities of sisterhood, beautifully balancing humor and heart. The story follows the three Blue sisters—Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky—as they each navigate their unique struggles with addiction, ambition, and grief following the death of their fourth sister, Nicky. Returning to New York to confront their past and save their childhood home, the sisters face not only the painful memories of their upbringing but also the secrets they've kept from themselves. Readers will appreciate Mellors’s vivid characterizations and the authentic portrayal of the messy, often chaotic process of healing and rediscovery. This novel resonates with anyone who has experienced loss or grapples with family dynamics, making it a heartfelt read about resilience and the journey to embrace life again.

Pass the tissues, please.
I haven't sobbed that violently in such a long time. This whole book felt so real, and raw. Please read it , but use caution. Check the TW.
Thank you so much for the ARC. I've already purchased a physical copy 💙

Very sad about not enjoying this book. I had high expectations but I had several issues with this story. Overall, I won't be reading more from this author because I fondly alight with her ideas and the way she represents her characters but just because it didn't worked for me, doesn't mean that it couldn't work for someone else.

There used to be four Blue sisters namely, Avery, Bonnie, Nicky, and Lucky. In this book, Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky find their way back into each other's lives when their sister Nicky died. It's a story of grief, addiction, identity, and most of all, sisterhood.

Avery is the eldest of the Blue sisters. Now she lives in London with her wife and works as a lawyer. In LA, Bonnie, a former boxer, now works as a bouncer for a club. And Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to navigate her mid-twenties. I loved that these sisters TRULY feel like sisters. Mellors wrote their history so well and so beautifully. They all come with their own baggage. They all feel real and are flawed. I like that, even though the book has 3 alternating POVs, as a reader I ended up rooting for all 3 of them instead of just leaning towards 1 sister.

Blue Sisters tackles the hard stuff, like the fact that sometimes, coming home is not easy. Where is home anyway, when you've been far from it for too long? This book shows you how life can be so short, and how often we take our lives for granted; too busy with things that maybe don't even matter in the end.

There's a quote in the book that hit me straight in the heart; it says grief never leaves. When a person passed away, all you are left is the 'missing'. You keep missing, and missing, and missing. Until you learn how to live with it. I think the author did an amazing job of showing how important it is to love people not only in the beginning and end, but especially in the in-betweens. To quote Mellors, "As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found".

coco mellors can definitely give readers memorable lines and feelings through her books and with this release she achieved that again. there were moments where i had to stop and reread a few passages, have a little sigh and then keep reading. the connection between these sisters is something special and complicated. i'm a sucker for siblings in literature, so this was up my alley!

I wanted to like this way more than I did. I found the sisters to be very one dimensional as characters and their occupations and lives were so fantastical that it was extremely difficult to relate to them in anyway. I thought the writing was exceptional and I definitely want to read more from this author.

I will admit that at first I thought oh no. Here comes another book with all the praise that I’m not going to like. It seemed like a slow start but I quickly changed my tune.

By the end I felt bonded to the Blue Sisters and I soon came to realize why this rough around the edges narrator was chosen for the role. Avery, Bonnie, Lucky and Nicky are four sisters raised in NY by an alcoholic father and a mother in denial. When they lose their sister Nicky, the sisters struggle with their grief in different ways. This is a story about sisterhood, family and grief. The characters were so well developed they felt like real people to me. I found this book asking the question of nature vs nurture regarding addiction. There’s known to be a genetic predisposition but how do you break out of that cycle. Thank you to coco Mellors for this five star ⭐️ ready . I’ll need to check out her other books.

Would love this one to be a movie 🎥 🍿 !!

Pick this up for a sweeping story of sisters and their struggles.

Blue Sisters 5/5 ⭐️

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book!

This book follows the titular Blue sisters, Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky, in the aftermath of their fourth sister, Nicky’s death. Naturally, each sister is left reeling and more disconnected from each other than ever. However, the sisters must return to the apartment they were raised in to stop it from being sold.

Coco Mellors perfectly captures moments and feelings in her writing. As someone who has 3 sisters, this book struck me to my core. It was breathtaking and heartbreaking. I truly could not recommend this book more.

📕”"Listen to me," she said. "I want you to really listen." She put her mouth next to Avery's ear to speak in a fierce whisper. "You are not that important."” It’s hard to hear from a mother, but within the given context there couldn’t be anything else this mother could have said to shake up her child and bring her back to life
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📗Thank you Coco Mellors making me feel like sh*t for being an only child. Yes I would have loved to be the oldest or youngest child, but blame it on my parents. Well I’m going to be that with my chosen sisters. I would be their Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky all at once and what Nicky would have been
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📘”They weren't tasteful like the French or puritanical like the Americans; if you suggested going for a drink in London, odds were you were going to get drunk. The desire for inebriation was tacit, no one needed to make a thing of it. Brits wanted oblivion and they wanted it now.” I loved this and I loved how true this was! Gimme some Brit level blackout 😂

This is the first book I have read from this author and I definitely enjoyed it. It is a year after three sisters have lost their other sister. They are all spiraling and have made a mess of so many different facets of their lives. They are dealing with individual losses and have come together to purge their childhood home together. I struggled a bit at times because I felt that I was being told what the characters were like as opposed to actually experiencing this insight in the dialogue. This is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to characters. I also felt the descriptions were often heavy handed and felt like overkill as well. I really enjoyed this book otherwise and liked the author's unique style and voice for the most part. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley. I would like to read more from this author.

I love books about sisters, and I was looking forward to reading something with that as a focal plot point. I enjoyed the tender and gritty way in which the book showcases a moment in time where the characters come to terms with the unique grief of losing a sibling.

However, although the writing is beautiful, the characters and their relationships often felt flat, and didn't feel alive to me. Partly because the book spends more time telling us about the characters and their relationships than actually showing them to us (for instance, saying that two siblings had strained relations as opposed to showing that strain). We only really get to see the siblings properly interacting in the last quadrant of the book, and that's when you start to get at the messiness and volatility unique to sibling relationships. For me, that last quadrant of the book was written remarkably better, and I wish the entire book embodied that essence more.

What I thought would be a fresh take with real characters felt overdone and predictable. Gorgeous women from Manhattan living uniquely exceptional lives, and their entire personalities centre on their dysfunctionality, self destruction, and addiction. I'm all for honest portrayals of addiction and substance abuse, but it bothers me to see it almost like a proxy for "complex" and "authentic" characters. It's been done, I want to see authors do better. I was really hopeful to see some discussion of a chronic illness but that too felt brief, with only a couple sentences in Bonnie's chapter that really even tried to get at what that experience is actually like, beyond just "unbearable pain leads to overdose". I truly wish there was more discussion of living with chronic illness beyond just using substance abuse as a cop out.

I really hope there was more from this book. I wish Coco mellors would show more than tell, and actually try to push the boundaries of what makes characters real and human. This felt like an attempt to get at something but didn't quite make it there.

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for the ARC

Totally the captures the dynamics of a fraught set of sisterly relationships. At one point, there's a line about how we skip back into our roles with our siblings and that line resonated with me. Here there are four sisters and even though Nicky is not with them, she is still a huge part of how they see see themselves and each other. I got totally immersed in their struggles and really enjoyed the shifting points of view.

Blue Sisters tugged at my heartstrings. Four sisters - three we get to know well by their stories while the fourth, Nicky, is revered by her sisters after her death. Each of the sisters had such a compelling storyline. Avery, the oldest, is going through a crisis which is affecting her marriage, her job and her health. Bonnie is carrying a torch for her former boxing coach while trying to choose a course for her future. Lucky, the baby, is a beautiful model jet setting around the world while drinking and drugging herself into oblivion. Each of them take turns clashing with the others but their love for each other shines through.
I found myself so very frustrated with their mother, even at the end of the book, unsure of her continued impact on her own babies.
I so appreciated their very realistic interactions which rang so very true to me. Many many thanks to Coco Mellors who developed these women who became so very real to me while they made me ride on their emotional roller coaster, Ballantine Books, and NetGalley who provided me with an arc of this emotionally touching book about the special love sisters have, published on September 3rd.

I loved this book. It was so well written. I love family dramas and this is full of drama and tragedy. I didn’t read the authors first book but I will be soon. I loved the way she writes and tells a story.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for a honest review.
4.5⭐️

Apologies for the lateness of this review but I'm utterly grateful to have had this opportunity to get this book in an e-ARC format because I absolutely adored Cleopatra and Frankenstein.

I think this book is a great, absolutely shattering portrait of grief and addiction and the ways in which bad coping mechanisms can blow up your life, but also the first third of this book was cliche city. I could tell exactly where everything was going and all of the characters' decisions hinges on all of them being unable to communicate with each other, gun to head and all. The ending and the middle portion of this book absolutely redeemed this from a 3 star read to a 4 star read. It's a stumble and not as powerful and strong as Cleo and Frank but definitely a book I'll hold onto going into the future.

Thank you so much Ballantine Books for this opportunity. Cannot wait to see what Coco writes in the future.

3.75 out of 5. This is an objectively very well written book. The characters are great and I am a sucker for a 4 sisters relationship (i have a lifelong obsession with Little Woman). However I think this books needs multiple trigger warnings. I don't think I needed a trigger warning and even for me it was little bit too much addiction. It is a lot to read through. Even though their working through it is a beautiful story, but all of them in this crazy spiraling train was hard to stomach at some points. Like I needed one anchor somewhere and not all of them throwing their life away. I did absolutely love how the ending played out, the 8 years into the future epilogue was very needed and very soothing.

Cocco Mellors is an excellent writer and really captures the complicated relationship between sisters. Four sisters, all different, one of whom has died. Just like Little Women, but nothing like Little Women. There's a lot of sadness in this novel, neglectful parents and addiction runs in the family. Much of the book is difficult, but it's overall realistic and optimistic.

This character driven story wormed its way into my head and I haven’t thought about anything else for days. It’s immediately being added to my 2024 favorites list!

BLUE SISTERS follows Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky Blue as they navigate grief and come to terms with the loss of their sister Nicky. At the start of this book it’s been a year without her and the remaining sisters are all handling their pain in different and equally destructive ways. Throughout the story we follow each sister’s journey to acceptance.

This book is messy. It’s full of flawed and broken characters just trying to get through life. It feels real and true and authentic and it had my heart in a vice grip the entire time. I cared deeply about each sister and loved how the novel wove from one woman’s perspective to the next.

From the first page I was gripped by the gorgeous writing, but I kept reading because of the incredibly intricate and deeply human storylines. There is so much complexity in this book that I think every reader will be able to find something specific to relate to. Personally, I felt so seen by Avery’s POV as a fellow older sister/caretaker. Just be prepared to be obsessed and have this book take over your entire life while you’re reading it!!

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc.

I was a little hesitant starting this book since I was not a fan of Cleopatra and Frankenstein. Aside from a few cliche lines and convenient timing moments, I would say this book is practically perfect.

The characters feel so REAL. I was heartbroken to say goodbye to them at the end - especially my favorite, Bonnie. In a weird way this book reminded me so much of A Haunting of Hill House (the tv show) because of how intimate and beautiful the sibling relationships are portrayed.

Mellors doesn’t shy away from the messy, nasty, and cruel aspects of human nature which makes this book that much more poignant and touching. This was a really special read.

In Blue Sisters, three sisters who have drifted apart—Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky—reunite in New York City after the death of their fourth sister. Each sister is coping in her own way: Avery, a recovering addict, seems to have her life on track but is secretly finding it hard to avoid self-destructive behaviors; Bonnie, a semi-retired boxer, is still struggling to find her next step; and Lucky, a successful model, is spiraling into a party-fueled lifestyle. Their once-close bond from childhood is tested as they face this devastating loss, forcing them to reconnect and support one another through grief and personal struggles.

Get your tissues ready. This is a story of addiction, loss, grief, and family drama....but it is also a beautiful, nuanced story of sisterhood.